Software applications may be taken through several stages before they are released. Software developers may develop and test a software application, quality assurance personnel may further test the software application, and the application may then be deployed to internal or external users.
Accordingly, there are many different environments in which a software application may operated. For example, the life cycle of a software application may include a test environment, a stage environment, and a production environment.
Application developers may test their applications in their own environments, known as test environments. Quality assurance personnel test all pilot applications in a stage environment. After they are deployed, software applications operate in a production environment.
Many software applications use directories to aid in fast lookup of information. One protocol that applications may use to look up information in various directories is known as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Applications that use LDAP are known as LDAP applications.
In many systems, there are notable limitations in moving a LDAP application from the test and stage environments to the production environment. For example, in the test and stage environments, LDAP applications are running against a test LDAP directory whose data was originally copied from a production LDAP directory. The data in the test LDAP directory become obsolete after some time as it they not getting live updates from the production LDAP directory.
The test LDAP directory is not getting up to date production LDAP data. Consequently, the development/QA testing may not catch certain issues that would only occur if running against the up to date production LDAP data. In this case, the development/QA testing may not be sufficiently effective.
Furthermore, deploying an already tested LDAP application after stage testing requires re-installation and re-configuration of the LDAP application against the production LDAP directory. This creates much administration overhead and introduces production service downtime to verify the newly installed and configured LDAP application, even if the installation and configuration go smoothly. If any problems occur, the problem is further exacerbated.